Is Jacksonville the best place for children or the suckiest? Depends on which glossy magazine you subscribe to.
According to the current issue of Parenting magazine Jacksonville is the “top city” for family recreation, due to is “abundance of park space” “year round moderate climate” and “all of the wonderful outdoor activities in this otheriwse urban center.” Right.
Of course, things look rather different over at Men’s Health, which ranked the city dead last on a list of safe cities for children. Jacksonville ranked 100 out of 100 for accidental deaths and predation by child sex offenders, and toward the bottom of the list on car seat inspection locations and abused-child protections. All in all, Men’s Health gave Jacksonville an “F.”
For Parenting mag’s sunny (arguably misinformed) take, click here. For Men’s Health’s darker (also somewhat misinformed) view, click here.
NY Times columnist Gail Collins delves into Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial slugfest today, including allegaitons about drunken orgies on candidate Jeff Greene’s 145-foot yacht. Says Collins, “Being the rich candidate is not without its burdens. For one, there’s the matter of that yacht, the Summerwind. Greene might see himself as an upstanding family man, but his yacht is bad, bad, bad. It’s an embarrassing, headline-making connection — the Levi Johnston of boats.”
Despite Greene’s denials that his boat, the Summerwind, is a floating rumpus room, she continues:
Clearly, the Summerwind has a life of its own, cruising around the globe, burning 50 gallons of fuel an hour, throwing orgies for B-list celebrities while Greene is home reading. It played host to Lindsay Lohan, who Greene claims he’s barely met. It took Mike Tyson on a Black Sea cruise that culminated in a drug-and-sex romp in Amsterdam, but Greene was only around for the part where they visited an 11th-century monastery in Ukraine.
St. Augustine activist Ed Slavin says a group of more than 18 city residents will join a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order against the St. Augustine City Commission.
The order will stop three commissioners from taking an all-expense paid trip to Spain later this month. Commissioners and three staffers plan to meet with Spanish dignitaries to seek their participation in the city’s 450th anniversary celebration. It is a violation of the state Sunshine Law for two or more elected officials to discuss city business without publicly noticing the meeting and holding it in a place that is easily accessible to the public. Slavin says meetings in Spain can’t possibly meet those requirements.
The commissioners and three staffers are to leave for Spain, I believe on August 20. The group hopes to file the lawsuit next week and to convince a judge to order the city crew to postpone the trip until the Sunshine issues can be heard. Slavin said he and several other residents met with Holland & Knight on Thursday, and the law firm has agreed to represent them.
In addition to stopping the trip to Spain, the residents also believe a contract approved unanimously by the City Commission on Monday violates the Sunshine Law. Commissioners voted to give $275,000 to a recently formed non-profit to manage the city’s 450th celebration. The main reason for turning over the party planning to a private entity is to circumvent the open meeting and open records laws. Compiling with the law would hamper planning and seeking sponsors. The tradeoff is oversight and accountability.
City Attorney Ron Brown explained to commissioners that the non-profit First America Foundation is exempt from the Sunshine Law because it isn’t performing a core function of city government, the city won’t exercise control over the Foundation’s plans and the Foundation’s bank won’t primarily be city-funded, although the first $275,000 certainly will be. But Brown says the celebration will cost millions. Slavin and the others want a judge to determine if the organization is indeed exempt. They think not, and they will ask the court to freeze a $275,000 lump sum payment the city is to pay to First America order a refund.
We get some crazy voicemails here at Folio Weekly, but this one has left us wondering whether to shut down the phone system entirely and move to Wichita. If you care to listen and have a good five minutes to squander, Click here.
Florida judges are beginning to recognize that many foreclosures have a basic flaw. You can’t file a foreclosure action if you can’t prove you own the mortgage loan that’s in default.
In St. Johns County, Circuit Court Judge Michael Traynor may impose sanctions on a bank and its attorney for misleading the court about loan ownership in a foreclosure case. In his ruling dismissing the foreclosure, Traynor said that the documents filed by the bank’s attorney Marshall C. Watson “appear to be inconsistent with one another and have changed as needed to benefit the plaintiff.”
After Traynor dismissed two foreclosures filed in the case because of ownership problems, Watson returned with a document showing the loan had been transferred to Wells Fargo. He then filed a document showing the loan had been transferred from First Bank of Nevada to Wells Fargo on March 30, 2010. Traynor pointed out in his ruling that the FDIC had shut down Bank of Nevada in 2008. Traynor has set a hearing on whether to impose sanctions on M & T Bank and Watson for August 19 at 1:45 p.m.
Meanwhile, a Fort Lauderdale attorney is seeking class action status for a lawsuit alleging violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act against a Florida law firm because of a pattern of problems in the chain of ownership of loans. Mother Jones has written an in-depth examination of the questionable and possible illegal practices of of the law office of Broward County attorney David J. Stern and other foreclosure mills. Stern’s firm alone handles about one fifth of the foreclosures filed in the state. Attorney Kenneth Eric Trent filed the lawsuit in the U.S. Court of the Southern District of Florida on behalf of ann Oakland Park homeowner Ignacio Damian. In the lawsuit, Trent alleges that Stern’s law firm has a pattern of pursuing foreclosures for lenders that don’t really own the loan on the home. After pressed to produce proof that Stern had the standing to foreclose on Damian, Stern produced a document showing transfer of Damian’s loan note from a lender to Stern. The note was signed Stern employee instead of by the lender. Trent also uncovered 21 Stern cases where a promissory note was executed before the notary who stamped it had been commissioned to notarize documents.
Last week word spread quickly that Public Defender Matt Shirk had hired an investigator with a past. The news came with a link to an L.A. Times story printed in 1996 about how Rosalie Hernandez, married to the scion of one of Tampa’s founding Ybor City families, had left her husband, her $375,000 home, her Mercedes 300 and her four daughters for serial killer Oscar Ray Bolin.
Once word was out that Shirk hired a woman married to a serial killer, Shirk cancelled his contract with Bolin. He said he didn’t realize her past. The same day, Folio Weekly’s Susan Cooper Eastman had a free-wheeling telephone conversation with Bolin from Bolin’s Jacksonville home. Bolin said she didn’t talk to the media, but then she laughed, joked, and got serious about explaining her work in an interview that ran roughly 45 minutes. Here are some quotations from that conversation.
“I stand by my reputation. My marriage is irrelevant to what I do. It’s disappointing and unnerving, but I stand by my reputation.”
“I am helping people.”
“My agenda is to assist a lawyer in getting life instead of the death penalty.”
“I was making half what I make in other jurisdictions. But it is what it is. I will trudge forward. This only enhances my quest to work with the fabulous lawyers who support me.”
“What better forum is there to fight for the underdog than the Public Defender’s Office? I still believe that the Public Defender will call me into complex cases.”
“I’ve been married 14 years [to Oscar Ray Bolin] in October. That’s personal. Quite frankly, it is no one’s business what I’m doing. I’m not hurting anybody.”
“People say I am a bad mother because what I did doesn’t conform to what other people do. I had great drive. I lived in a half-million-dollar house. But people don’t know what does on inside. It’s not anybody’s business. How is my life so interesting? Why don’t people ask about what I do in my professional life. I can tell amazing things I’ve done, really. There was a man on Death Row who told me where the body of the victim could be found. He negotiated a plea deal. I’ve worked on over 800 cases. Nobody has more exposure and more access than me, and every day I have more.”
“[Twenty-one] percent of people on Death Row are from Duval County. Do you think they got there because their cases could not be mitigated? You can’t do mitigation if you aren’t given the resources to do a life history investigation. It can take lots of money. It is the nature of the animal that we spent lots of money convicting a person, and we need to spend lots of money trying to save their lives. Read the rest of this entry »
From the 20th floor of the Wachovia “Gulf Life” Building, the Jacksonville staff of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla) saw sheets white foam blow across the St. Johns River and become wedged in heaps against bulkheads on the north bank of the river. Up close, the foam looked like egg whites whipped to stiff peaks. A man in Fleming Island said the stuff was three-feet thick. An industrial chemist sampled some foam near the Shand’s Bridge with a swimming pool test kit, and he said it contained cyranic acid, a pool chemical.
The following day on Friday, Nelson boarded a water taxi to get a better look himself. He said he wanted to take a sample directly to the United States Environmental Protection Agency for testing. St. Johns Riverkeeper Neil Armingeon joined Nelson in the bow of the boat with a cluster of television cameras, photographers and reporters trained on them. The state Department of Environmental Protection Northeast Florida Director Gregory Strong, the city’s Environmental and Compliance Director Ebeneezer Gujjarlapudi and the city’s Environmental Quality Division Chief Vince Sebold were also onboard.
Armingeon had a message for Nelson. Since early spring, there were algae blooms, then more than 350 dead fish and now the foam. “This fish kill will probably go down as one of the largest fish kills (we’ve had). And then the foam issue, I’m not sure if anybody knows what is going on,” said Armingeon.
Nelson asked if the fish deaths and the foam might all be part of the cycle of an algae bloom. The algae robs the water of oxygen and it kills fish and then when the algae breaks down, the foam is part of the biodegradation. It’s caused by too many nutrients in the river, but it’s not an unusual occurrence.
But Armingeon pointed out the fish didn’t die from algae toxins or lack of oxygen. “These are all signs that the river is sick, that it can’t assimilate what is being fed into it,” he told Nelson
Nelson recalled he had run the length of the river in an airboat in 1974, more than 200 miles over three days, from its source to Jacksonville. He said he was shocked during the trip to learn there were 75 outlets in Jacksonville where raw sewage was dumped directly into the river. He said that compared to 1974, the river has been cleaned up. “But you are telling me we still got so many nutrients in the river that it is causing the river to have this reaction.,” Nelson said. Read the rest of this entry »
“I felt like I was going in to see Hannibal Lector.”
– What local death penalty mitigation specialist Rosalie Bolin told the LA Times she was thinking the first time she went to see the man who would later become her husband, Death Row inmate Oscar Ray Bolin – a man convicted of the brutal rape and murders of three women.
Rosalie Bolin, who was recently hired by 4th District Public Defender Matt Shirk, eventually gave up her $375,000 home, her Mercedes 300, her marriage to prominent criminal defense attorney Victor Martinez and her four children in order to marry Bolin. She quit the Hillsborough County’s public defender’s office under pressure, after jail officials suggested she’d had sex with Bolin in his cell. For a link to the eye-opening LA Times story, click here.
To read how the Florida Times-Union completely soft-shoes the hire and glosses over Rosalie Bolin’s past, click here.
Straight from the file containing “Songs that make you want to scrape your own ears off” comes this little ditty, courtesy of Mike Weinstein’s unbearbly white son, Scott Leigh. According to Daily Caller, the state Rep’s son “wrote, produced, choreographed and danced the lead in the music video.” The online publication observed, “the ad would easily fit into an advertisement break during an episode of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’ – when the show was still in its prime. And, to clarify, the video is not a parody.”
The item was picked up and furhter savaged by Gawker.com, which issued this caveat:
Warning: If you watch this video, a campaign song about Florida State Rep. Mike Weinstein, you will be hearing “Mike! Mike! Mike Weinstein!” all day. It’s just thatcatchy.
Jessica Simpson has apparently been in and around the J’ville area, visiting the grandparents of her new Zen-boy beau Eric Johnson. According to US Weekly, which featured the above pic of the blonde starlet arriving at Jacksonville International Airport, Simpson stayed at the luxurious Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, which the magazine hilariously dubbed “modest” - twice.
“They looked cute together,” the mag quoted an “insider,” as saying, who noted the couple spent time with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door (shocking behavior at a hotel, right?). The insider also observed that while the pair was strolling to their “modest” room, “Her hand was on his butt.”
To read more — admit it, you want more! — click here.
